Compliance based Trustworthiness Calculation Mechanism in Cloud Environment

Establishing trust is one of the most challenging issues in emerging cloud computing area. It is becoming increasingly complex for cloud users to make distinction (with respect to trustworthiness) among service providers offering similar kinds of services. There must be some mechanisms in the hands of users to determine trustworthiness of service providers so that they can select service providers with confidence and with some degree of assurance that service provider will not behave unpredictably or maliciously. Though various approaches exist to form trust between service providers and users, little work has been done in the area of forming trust based on compliance of QoS parameters which have been promised in SLA. In this paper an attempt has been made to design and simulate a mechanism to calculate trustworthiness of service providers based on their compliance to promised SLA parameters. The model has been simulated in MATLAB. The validation has been done using synthetic data set. Validation results show that approach is workable and can be used to evaluate trustworthiness of service providers in a cloud environment. © 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Peer-review under responsibility of the Program Chairs of ITDS-2014.